What are some signals that your school is becoming more powerful, comfortable, and capable of innovation? What are some signals that perhaps you are not? One of the benefits/privileges of NOT working at one school is that I get to observe and synthesize what I see at many schools. Here are a few measures of [...]
Want to see how a school can go from 0-60 in a short period of time? Think you have obstacles that are difficult to overcome? Read on! As my readers know, Julie Wilson invited me on to a team working with Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe, NM, a recognized underperforming school with an extremely [...]
I have just wrapped up a week at the East Asian Regional Council of Schools conference in Malaysia. Some observations on independent schools in Asia: The economies in many or most Asian countries, combined with an extraordinary (healthy or not?) cultural obsession with academic success, has created an enormous market demand for K-12 schools. Even [...]
I had a telephone interview two weeks ago with Kim Greene of Scholastic Administrator Magazine, and the article was posted online a few days ago. It covers some of the key lessons of #EdJourney. Another upcoming article which I can't wait to see is an online interview I did with Polish magazine "Sygnal"; the translations [...]
What does a transformed and deeper learning experience look like, and how can schools move intentionally in that direction? Last year I was honored to co-present a session at NAIS with Bo Adams in which I focused (in a general sense) on the strategic or organizational side of this coin, and Bo focused on the [...]
If you are an educator interested in re-shaping the world of K-12 learning to prepare our students for the future, there are a few folks you just HAVE to follow, and one is Pam Moran. She does not blog often, but when she does, the posts are rich in both examples and links. Pam and [...]
In a very busy couple of months, I am seeing sharp lines between the way I "teach" and the methods of, perhaps, more traditional instruction, be it with children or adults. The lines grow brighter as I get to observe in classrooms and workshops. One element keeps popping up: why do you, the teacher, have [...]
It has been a busy week, so catching up on resources to share: I had a full day at Summit School in Winston-Salem, NC. In the evening we invited the community in for a conversation on the future of education; you can watch the video of the presentation here. I was also interviewed on Fox [...]
I am/was a Dead Head; not the kind who followed the band around the country camped out in decrepit cars begging tickets and hand-outs for food, but enough to drive a few hours to a county park or Berkeley for a Sunday afternoon with friends whenever the Dead were in town. Rolling Stone just published [...]
Perhaps the most powerful driver of traditional, standards-focused education in America is the sense that we have fallen behind many countries in student performance. In our sound-bite world, the nexus of this concern are the results of international exams of math, reading, and writing. As I have written in the past, educators for whom I have [...]